Moho Forum

Hi,

I just watched a bunch of tutorials on how to turn the head........ good stuff. is there any tutorial on how to turn the head while performing other animations? such as turn the head and blink or move the eyes at the same time. ..... how would I rig it?

Hey phillyd023,
I actually just recently did this. There are a few places in my most recent video where I have a character shaking his head left and right.

Here's how I do it.

The overall character is a bone layer, and that's where you have bones that manipulate the overall position of each body part (including the head).

I have a head switch layer under that, to switch between front and 3/4 views of the head. Each of those views within the head switch layer is its own bone layer.

Let's take the front view bone layer. Within this layer, I have a switch layer for different eyelid positions, nested switch layers for mouths and mouth phonemes, plus all the standard vector layers for eyes, face, nose, eyebrows, hair, etc.

Add a bone on this front head bone layer and call it head turn. Make a smart bone action and rotate it to the right 90 degrees, and then move your character's features to a new spot facing the right side. You might have to go into detail to keyframe the face with point animation along the timeline so that it looks good from the beginning all the way through. Do the same when rotating to the left. If you want it to turn beyond 3/4 view, you'll probably need to use masking to hide the other eye. You can also change the layer order for things like hair and ears.

When you finish setting it up and go to the mainline, that character's head layer will have a smart bone to control head movement in the directions you chose. If you set it up right, you'll be able to move the head in "3D space" independently of features like the eyebrows, eyelids, and mouth.

Hope that helps!

Thrashador